Ed Miliband spoke to a roomful of women on Thursday. This is because Labour has spotted that women are not, on the whole, very keen on David Cameron. Yvette Cooper, who was with the Labour leader, announced gravely that of all the cuts announced in the autumn statement this week, 73% will be taken from women and only 27% from men.

The women in the room, near the Tower of London, all worked for charities, pressure groups or organisations that help prostitutes, victims of violence and so forth. I would guess they were almost all Guardian readers. To go by the level of applause, the people they most disliked were in ascending order: men in general, the people who made the choice for BBC Sports Personality of the Year, the coalition government, and Jeremy Clarkson.

As the Top Gear presenter was reviled I felt an emotion that has been alien to me ever since that distant day when I first became aware of his existence – just a twinge of pity.

For what he said about shooting strikers in front of their families was obviously a joke. It was flagged up as a joke, and it had a loudspeaker on top screeching: "This is a joke!" All right, it was a crass, silly joke, and certainly not a funny joke, which taken out of context looked like a horrifying remark, but in context was just a crack, a drollery, a blague.

Miliband, who had not seen the remark in context, said it was "absolutely disgraceful and disgusting". The prime minister has described it as "silly", and he speaks as a friend of Jeremy Clarkson. They spent last Boxing Day together, which makes you wonder about the gags in their crackers.

Harriet Harman mentioned the absence of women from the sports personality list. The BBC must be regretting this. "Is it that women don't do sports?" she asked. "Is it because they don't have personalities?"

There were loud sounds of agreement.

Miliband said she was a "fantastic deputy leader". As for Yvette, she was "doing a fantastic job, exposing what is going on".

For any man, it was a difficult gig, which Miliband coped with by agreeing with everything. There was a lot of jargon: "We have a combination of the localism agenda – it's a cross-boundary issue, a national commissioning framework, with contracts going to generic service providers … we need an empowerment approach," said one woman, to which "oh, come off it!" is never a suitable reply.

Ed was cautious. "I am not going to turn rape crisis centres into a political football," he said, and I think I know what he meant.

But the biggest applause came for a woman who said: "We've got a problem. It's men, and a problem with the masculinity that bigs itself up at our expense!"

Ed responded by saying that politics was far too macho, and prime minister's question time was "ludicrous". He got out unscathed, but I doubt if he made a single convert.